behind every beautiful thing (there's some kind of pain)
by TolkienGirl
Summary: It's been three decades, and now it's Sam's turn to carry Dean. (Coda to 12x03, The Foundry. No slash, just brotherly bonding.)


**A/N: So of course I needed to write Sam's perspective. And brother feels.**

 **Title from Bob Dylan. Warning for a bit more language than I usually include.**

Dean's disappeared deep within the bunker. Sam doesn't follow him, but he isn't leaving. In time, that will be enough.

At least he hopes so.

Sam stares at the library, thinks of all the dreams that have died here, thinks that maybe that's why he's never brought himself to call it home.

He feels too old, too set apart, too knowing. He gets it—he understands why Mom needs time, and understands far, far more deeply why that nearly brought Dean to his knees.

It's been three decades, and now it's Sam's turn to carry Dean.

But not tonight. Tonight, that will only get him Dean's famed right-hook in the nose. Sam goes back to his room, flips on the light. Somehow, he keeps saying that same pained look mirrored between Mom's face and Dean's, and if he'd had more time maybe he could have told her that Winchesters aren't very good about people leaving, but it doesn't make the leaving wrong.

The story of his life, Sam thinks, is one of loss. Jess. Dad. Bobby. Pastor Jim. Ellen. Jo. Rufus. Charlie. Kevin. If he wanted to go on, he could.

Instead, he's just gone on in a different way. Now, flat on his bed, arms folded over his chest, he tries to imagine what he'd be doing if Amara had brought back Jess. If Jess had come back, and then left—he understands how that could burn deeply of rejection.

Jess. In his dreams at twenty-two, they're married now. They've been married for ten years. And there are kids—three or four or something. And Dean is there, and—

The days when he thinks of her—they hurt. The days when he doesn't—those hurt more. Because the decade has gone by and Sam left Jess buried in California, even if he didn't leave his love for her behind.

Pages turn, chapters end. The Winchesters, after all, were not given the privilege of writing their own story.

But as much as it stings Sam's Winchester conscience, there's a part of him that knows better. A part of him that believes, _sometimes, you have to let go._

In memory, he sees again the blue starlight of Bobby's soul, rising and free. Freedom, Sam understands. It's an impulse and a dream and sometimes a necessity. It isn't the same as the despairing calculus of _what's dead should stay_ _dead._ What is now dead once lived, and the loss is felt because love was felt first.

He can't comfort Dean yet. Not just because Dean is imploding, not just because it's going to bring Sam himself to his knees just to see that, see the crumbling of months and even years of small steps forward, too often followed by two steps back. No, Sam must wait for tomorrow, even if only Sam is grateful that tomorrow comes at all.

…

Castiel calls at 3:30 in the morning.

It's no matter; Sam still isn't sleeping. "Hey, Cas."

"Hello, Sam. I tried calling Dean. He didn't answer."

"Yeah." Sam exhales. "Did you—uh, did you find anything?" The silence Cas has broken, the silence of the bunker, had felt as though it stretched for miles.

"It was Lucifer. I'm…on the trail. Nothing urgent at the moment."

Sam should inquire further. Sam should—maybe this is how his own grief is working, in sudden, insurmountable lethargy. "Call if you need anything, OK?"

"I will call. Sam, is something…wrong?"

There is no use in keeping something that is not really a secret. "Mom left."

He expects a blunt question from Cas, the typical oblivion. Instead, the angel says, "She did not feel like she belonged."

Sam reels a little and recovers. "Yeah, I, uh. I think so. She just needs a little time."

"But that is not easy for you." To his credit, Castiel has improved his sympathy margin over the years.

Sam tries for a laugh. "Nothing's easy for us. I understand, though."

There's a beat of silence. "Does Dean?"

"No," Sam says. In his mind, he can't stop playing it over and over, Dean flinching back, Dean staring at the ground—and how, though Sam _did_ understand, didn't resent his mother, how he'd wanted more than anything to say, _if you're looking for your four-year-old kid, there, you've got him_ , because this was Dean in all his youngest, longest pain.

"Should I come back?"

"No, no, Cas. Keep fighting the fight. I'll take care of Dean." And as the words leave Sam's lips, he feels a reversal of their roles as he has only a few times in the past. It's Sam's turn.

…

Morning brings no sign of Dean.

Sam remembers the days after Jess's death, when he didn't get want to get up and face another day, marching forward and dragging his heels through the dust of too-quickly fading memories. Dean was always at his elbow, a much younger Dean, with so many scars already but still a light in his eyes and a hitch in his voice of emotion not yet hidden—" _C'mon, Sammy_. _C'mon. Eat something_."

Sam tries the kitchen.

It's empty.

He goes outside the bunker, after searching it rather thoroughly. Dean's own bed is untouched. Sam didn't expect him to sleep anyway, but he knows it's also because that's where Mom was staying.

Dean is standing on the ridge above the bunker entrance, smoking. Sam starts at that; to his knowledge, Dean hasn't smoked since his late teens. It was a habit he picked up around the time he dropped out of high school, then quit soon after. Partly because Dad was less than thrilled; partly because it made him short of breath.

One of the downsides of being at least six inches taller than any given dude means that Sam isn't exactly hard to notice. He clambers up what is basically a deer path, and knows that Dean sees him. And knows that Dean knows that Sam knows.

The morning is crisp and clear. Sam wonders where Mom is. Will she go back to Lawrence? Visit her grave?

More importantly, will she come back?

Sam thinks about Stanford, how Dad told him to stay gone. How he kind of wanted to.

Dean says nothing when Sam joins him on the ridge, just blows out a stream of smoke. "Where'd you get those?" Sam asks. Mild. Non-judgmental. It's his turn.

"Gas n' Sip," says Dean, just a beat after it seemed like he wasn't going to answer at all. He's squinting out at the sunrise, very grim of jawline and shoulder set, but Sam still thinks he looks young. On the edge. Trying hard for his usual military damping of emotion, and not quite succeeding.

The truth is, Dean doesn't know how to "soldier up" about Mom, because Dean loved Mom before he ever knew what it was to be a soldier.

For that, in some way, Sam is grateful. Sam has always loved best the parts of Dean that were unformed and unforced by their father or the hunting life. He loves Dean's rare outbursts of true, child-like glee. His astonishing memory for shapes and symbols and imagery. His astute mechanical skill. But if Sam will love those parts, he supposes, too, that he should also love best and protect most the Dean that died the night of the fire. The Dean that was unexpectedly resurrected when Amara decided to turn back fate.

"You want breakfast?" Sam ventures.

"No."

"OK." Sam wants to put a hand on his brother's shoulder, but Dean doesn't respond well to physical touch unless their life is at an extreme—jubilant celebration or near-death. Sam sighs.

"I would have let her take Baby, if she wanted," Dean says. His voice is quiet, a little thick. Sam thinks that he's probably been drinking.

"Yeah."

Dean swears under his breath once, then aloud, and grinds the cigarette under his boot heel. "Jesus, Sam. It's like I said. We can't have one good thing."

His eyes are glassy and bright. Sam finds it hard to meet them. It's been a while. Again, Sam is pained. Chagrinned. They've come so very far—through sorrow and fire, as always, as since the beginning—and yet now again, Dean is all broken edges and overwhelming grief.

"She'll come back," Sam says. "Time isn't…" and he doesn't know how to say this, fifteen years on and he still can't rehash the Stanford argument with Dean. He knows, of course, that Dean is proud of him. That Dean tells people, tells hunters, _my brother went to college_. But that doesn't mean Sam wants to say aloud, _I needed to leave you. I needed you to let me go, for a little while, so I could find out who I wanted to be_. Dean can't hear that. Not right now. So all Sam says is, "She needs to understand the world."

Dean's mouth works for a second before he answers, and then he rasps out, " _We_ were supposed to be her world."

Their mother's love, Sam realizes, suddenly, is the only love Dean ever believed he might have a legitimate claim to. He never had to suffer her apparent rejection. Not until now.

"We are. It's because of her family that…Dean, she needs to know herself before she can get to know us. We can't just—"

"We can't just _what_ , Sam?" And there is it is, the snap. "I'm not saying it has to be picture perfect. We're— _us_. Dad's gone. I can deal with her needing to grieve, or adapt, or hell, if she wants to hunt or stay inside all day long for a year I wouldn't care. I'd do anything. She just wasn't supposed—" He stops abruptly, fishes in his pocket for another cigarette, and lights it. Sam pretends that he can't see his brother's hands shaking, though he doesn't know who he's pretending for.

"I miss Dad, but…I wouldn't want him to come back." Dean swallows hard, takes another drag on his cigarette. The smell has always repulsed Sam, but he can't show that. He schools his feature into neutrality, recognizing how, even after all these years, it must be hard for Dean to say those words.

There are insights Sam has, particular to him and their shared history, which Dean was never able or willing to reach. Sam's teenage objections were raw and still not completely formed, but he wasn't wrong. Dad made Dean smaller. There was only room in John Winchester's world for what they were, not for what they could become.

Sam doesn't resent Dad, not anymore. He remembers his teenage years, filled with passionate self-righteousness, and his years at Stanford, rejecting an entire picture of an old life except for (occasionally) his brother. Sam's grown up, and suffered so much he just can't afford to hold onto older, simpler pains.

But Dean…Dean's relationship with Dad is much more complicated. It spans a before-and-after, just as their history with their mother now does.

"I've made my peace with him, is what I'm saying," Dean goes on, halting a little over the words that are probably far too touchy-feely for his usual tastes. "But—there's not a day I've spent where I didn't…want her back. And hell. Now she's back." The last is bitter, bitten off.

He's said too much. Not for Sam, but for himself. Sam can see it. He's got to say something, before Dean shuts down again, buries himself in old and new vices, hides somewhere deep in his own head.

"I don't remember before," Sam says slowly. "I just—my first memory isn't Mom, of course, but it's not Dad, either. It's you. I know we always kept her memory with us, Dean, but the memories…weren't mine. I always hated that. I felt like I didn't belong to that part of who our family was. But that's not the point."

"Do you have a point?" Dean asks, wearily, but he's listening.

"You and Dad. You were my family. And when Dad was gone, I still had you. We've been there all along, Dean. All of those thirty-three years weren't lost to me. I know who we are."

"So do I," Dean says. "Two seriously screwed up sons of bitches, who can't make a good thing stick."

Sam allows himself a humorless chuckle. "Maybe. But Dean—I'm glad I'm not a _solitary_ screwed up son of a bitch. You were there from my first memory. I'm glad you're still here."

"OK, OK. Go write for Hallmark," Dean shoots back, but he puts out this cigarette, too, and Sam thinks that's progress.

Because Amara may have given Mom back to Dean, but she also let Dean come back to Sam. And Dean, Sam knows, will never leave him.

In time, that will be enough.

Maybe it already it is.


End file.
